The McGuffins are different but we’re in the same world: missing people, a shot partner, a femme fatale, trouble with the local cops and a bleak cynical universe from which no hope is expected and none is given. Dick had read and re-read Dashiell Hammett and greatly admired his style and so it’s not a big stretch to compare Androids with The Maltese Falcon.
Assassinations, riots, Vietnam, hippies, drugs, counter-culture, scandals and the Cold War were the context for Dick to write his novel, which is actually a pretty straightforward detective story set in a nightmare future. His default paranoia was exacerbated by his experiments with drugs, his dealings with local street thugs, and his anti-government activities during the Nixon era.ĭo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written during the period 1966-1968, possibly the two most turbulent years America has experienced since World War II. He moved often, he was married five times and even though he wrote constantly he was not good at keeping money. Dick’s adult life was fragmented to say the least. He went to the same high school as Ursula Le Guin and after a brief period at UC Berkeley he dropped out and quickly began selling science fiction stories to magazines and newspapers. In our universe, after Jane’s death, Dick and his family migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Dick sometimes flirted with the idea that in a parallel universe he was the one who had died and Jane had survived – he was already buried in the grim Fort Morgan cemetery, next to Interstate 76, and Jane was the science fiction writer living in California. The grave awaited Dick for five decades and when he died in 1982 sure enough the twins were reunited in death. Jane was buried in a lonely grave in the bleak Colorado plains town of Fort Morgan with, morbidly, a space left on the headstone for baby Phil. All his life Dick felt Jane’s absence and her loss is frequently referenced in his fiction. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of his best known novels and it was here that he explored in some depth notions of dying and consciousness.īorn in Chicago in 1928, his twin sister Jane Charlotte Dick died when Dick was only a few weeks old. “I’d rather be a living dog, than a dead science fiction writer,” he once said. Perhaps he hoped it was the former but knew it was the latter. Dick wondered what being alive really felt like and whether unbeing would kill that state of consciousness sometimes he believed that death was merely a transition between states and other times that it was the final destination.
He dreamed about his death wrote constantly about death. Dick was obsessed with death would be to understate the case.
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